A study released this week in The Lancet found a link between high carbohydrate intake and risk of death. The resulting headlines had dedicated low-carb dieters celebrating and low-fat vegans spoiling for a fight. But as with most dietary studies, there is more to it than the headlines claim.

In the study, researchers collected detailed diet questionnaires from over 135,000 individuals across 18 countries. Researchers then followed participants over several years and collected data on events like heart attack, stroke, death from cardiovascular disease, and death from all causes. Even though everyone’s lifetime risk of dying is 100 percent, researchers can calculate whether diet seems to make people more or less likely to die during any given time.

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Here’s what they found. On average, people eating more than 77 percent of their daily calories from carbohydrate had a 30 percent greater risk of dying over any given time than people who ate less than 50 percent from carbs. Unsurprisingly, researchers also found the opposite was true: On average, people eating greater than 35 percent of their daily calories from fat had a lower risk of dying compared to people consuming the lowest amount, about 11 percent of daily calories from fat.

Headlines have gone on to suggest that this might mean high-fat diets are protective or high-carb diets are dangerous, but these interpretations miss key details.

First, since a low-fat diet is typically considered to be a diet with less than 30 percent of calories from fat, participants could still report eating a traditionally low-fat, high-carb diet and experience no increased risks at all. The “protective” effect of increased fat intake applied to everyone who ate more than 23 percent of their calories from fat. And people who ate as much as 62 percent of calories from carbs, and as low as 16 percent from fat, saw no detrimental effect. For some context, the National Center for Health Statistics at the CDC report that the average American gets about 50 percent of his or her daily calories from carbohydrate and 34 percent from total fat.

It’s also unclear if the increased risks seen in this study can truly be applied to worried folks in the Western world reading these headlines. Among the 18 countries studied, several were very low-income or middle-income countries where diets high in refined carbohydrates (like white rice) were eaten due to low access to more varied, nutritious diets. So some of these high-carb diets may go hand-in-hand with malnutrition. Participants in developing nations may have had differential access to things like basic health care, clean water and air, or getting enough food to meet their energy or micronutrient needs, and these factors could have contributed to their greater risk of dying.

The Takeaway: An extremely low-fat, high-carbohydrate diet with less than 20 percent of calories from fat was associated with an increased risk of non-cardiovascular death, but moderate fat and carbohydrate intakes were not associated with increased risks. It would be better to ignore the attention-grabbing shock headlines in favor of more measured coverage, like this headline from Science Daily: “Moderate consumption of fats, carbohydrates best for health, international study shows.”